NEWS
April 4, 2013 | By Alana Semuels
NEW YORK -- How much should employers pay the people who serve up your french fries and ring up your tacos? It's an issue that's being raised for the second time in six months as hundreds of fast food workers in New York City walked out on the job Thursday to demand higher wages. An estimated 400 workers from 60 restaurants in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Harlem participated, organizers say. The campaign, organized in part by the group Fast Food Forward, is asking for wages to be raised to $15 an hour, which in some cases would double the pay of some workers, raising their pay to around what a substitute teacher makes, or an emergency medical technician, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
NEWS
February 25, 2013 | By Mary MacVean
People who volunteer are often known to say they get more out of the experience than those who are being helped. A study in Canada concurs that that may be true: Researchers say that high school students who volunteered improved their own health. The researchers recruited and assessed 106 10 th graders from western Canada. Half were assigned to volunteer weekly with elementary school children for two months. At the end of that time, the high school students showed significantly lower markers for cardiovascular disease risk, including body mass index and cholesterol levels when compared with students in a control group.
NEWS
February 14, 2013 | By Jon Healey
One key to launching a successful business is finding the right problem to solve. That's why so many entrepreneurs are inspired by problems they encounter themselves or that stymie their family and friends. The trick is not confusing an anecdote for a trend. For example, consider Ramin Bastani, founder and chief executive officer of Los Angeles-based Qpid.me . The company's website is designed to help people deal with one of life's great mysteries: namely, is it safe to have sex with someone I just met in a bar?
NEWS
February 13, 2013 | By Karen Kaplan
Researchers have some new advice for high school students who want to improve their grades: Become friends with academically oriented classmates. It may sound obvious, but researchers went to considerable effort to prove it. They surveyed all members of the junior class at Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, N.Y., and asked students to rate each of their classmates as either a “best friend,” a “friend,” an “acquaintance” or someone they didn't know. They got responses from 92% of students and used them to reconstruct the social networks among 158 11th-graders as of Jan. 11, 2011.
OPINION
February 6, 2013
Beware of education miracles. Too often, there's less there than meets the eye. Remember the extraordinary gains in test scores and lowered dropout rates in Houston schools more than a decade ago? They became the model for the federal No Child Left Behind Act and catapulted the schools' superintendent, Rod Paige, to his position as U.S. secretary of Education at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. Only years later was it discovered that schools were recording students as having "transferred" when they had in fact dropped out, and that students who were expected to do badly on standardized tests were often kept from taking them.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 3, 2013 | By Rick Rojas, Los Angeles Times
A triumphal march blared and the crowd roared Saturday afternoon as hundreds of competitors filed into the massive gymnasium at the Roybal Learning Center. The high school students were pumped - some teams danced a little to get warmed up, and at least one team had their school mascot there to root them on - and they were prepared, having spent months training for this moment. Some of the students carried themselves with the intensity of gladiators stepping into the ring. The challenge before them was a purely intellectual one, but it was still daunting: The last leg of Los Angeles Unified's regional Academic Decathlon was about to begin.